LibreOffice 5.4 Released

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 5.4, a major release of the 5.x family that comes with significant new features, and especially with a number of incremental improvements to Microsoft Office file compatibility.

“Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’, LibreOffice developers have focused on file simplicity as the ultimate document interoperability sophistication. This makes ODF and OOXML files written by the free office suite more robust and easier to exchange with other users than the same documents generated by other office suites,” said The Document Foundation in a blog post.

Out of all the new features in this release, the most notable include a new standard color palette based on the RYB color model. File format compatibility has been improved, with better support for EMF vector images, and importing PDF files offers a much better rendering quality.

If you are a LibreOffice Writer user, you will be happy to learn that the full structure of a document is preserved when exporting or pasting numbered and bulleted lists as plain text.

You can already use LibreOffice Online with Kolab Now. With the 5.4 release, LibreOffice Online has been improved as well. Performance is better, and the layout adapts responsively to mobile devices. Additionally, a read-only mode has been added.

The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 5.0.0 at the beginning of August, and the first update 5.0.1 appeared just three weeks later. In addition to several fixes and new features under the hood, Version 5 provides some very visible improvements.